Why am I doing this? It is a good question, and one that I have wrestled with. I have been critical of the “look how many followers I have” syndrome, where people are fixated on the size of their audience. It’s almost a self-esteem issue in some cases.

Yet I watch some people with several thousand followers ask questions and get a flood of great answers in no time flat. Meanwhile, with just a few hundred followers, I get much fewer responses. I also see how there are times when I would like people to know about something interesting on Digg or Sphinn or Mixx, that this would be a great way to let more people know — not just about my stuff, but about all sorts of great items.

I would love you to Sphinn these, too. With more Twitter followers, I know I can share these gems with more people.

So for a limited time, I am offering all my new followers a free copy of Don’t Get Banned By The Search Engines as an incentive and a thank you for taking the time to add me to your follow list. I am looking forward to meeting you at Twitter.

Hmmm…I wonder what Mom has in her fridge…let’s check. I see. Ooh, she has some good stuff. Let’s just send her a message here… “Hi mom. Thinking of doing anything with that lasagna? I’m free to come over for dinner.” I suppose I should copy my brother on that one.

This is an important issue for anyone interested in SEO because increasingly the lines between various aspects of online marketing, including SEO, will be blurred. In fact, that is one of the foundations on which my free eBook Sticky SEO was written.

I encourage you to read the full interview, and at the bottom of the page Danny has added links to previous interviews in the series, all of which will shed further light on how you can use social media to help promote your website.

We all know, or at least assume, that having multiple links to the same URL from a domain is an exercise in diminishing returns as far as search engine rankings are concerned. That is to say, if you score a link to your home page from one page on a domain, any additional links to your home page from other pages on that same domain are worth less. And the more links to your home page from that domain, the less each one is worth.

This makes sense. If a domain has 1000 pages, a sitewide link cannot be viewed as 1000 endorsements for your home page.

But the web is a changing place, and in the past few months, services have been cropping up to submit your website to 1000 and even 2000 social bookmarking websites. These services are similar to all those directory submission services and the article submission services, and they are often offered by the same people. On the surface of it, there is nothing wrong, but it does require a reaction from the search engines.

But first, a personal rant. Submitting your home page to 2000 social bookmarking sites is NOT social bookmarking. It is bookmarking, but it is NOT social. If it was social, these services would be promoting your page on these sites, networking with other users, and you would end up with several links at any one social bookmarking site (assuming your content is actually interesting).

OK, that was more than just a personal rant.* In fact, I’ll bet the search engines are noticing the same thing and looking at the same numbers and raising one of their search engine eyebrows right now. If there are thousands of single-link entries at each social bookmarking website, most of which are essentially paid links, should those each be worth more than each entry that garnered, let’s say 12 Diggs or Zooms? Those dozen votes clearly are exactly the type of recommendations the search engines look for in their algorithms. Single links at social bookmarking websites clearly are not. Each Digg or Zoom should be worth more than each single entry. In fact, we might even go so far as to say that the more Diggs or Zooms, the more each one should be worth.

What should the search engines do? Clearly, their algorithms must distinguish between sitewide links and links that appear numerous times independently on the same website. This is true not just for social bookmarking sites, but also for forums where a resource might be cited in numerous threads over time.

Maybe Google and Yahoo and MSN already do this. Maybe I’m not being that heretical after all. Naw, that just would be too out-of-character.

Note that it is a numbered list, and not a “top 10″ list. Matt chose a top 9 list, which is just a little offbeat.. Note that there are plenty of illustrations. And the text and images combined are useful – actually demonstrating how to do something - not just silly stuff (although sometimes I like silly stuff, too).

If you are a Canadian who enjoys online social networking, you might have spent some time as an orphan. You don’t find much Canadian coverage at the big US-based social bookmarking websites like Digg and Reddit. During the heat of the federal election, there was nary a whisper about Harper or Dion – it was all McCain and Obama. That’s natural, because stories are voted to prominence by the membership, most of whom don’t know whether a Harper bounces nor how one would properly inflate a Dion.

You are no longer an orphan!

We have set up a made-in-Canada social bookmarking website just for you: Zoomit Canada. If you are Canadian, please come and join. And please tell all your friends.

If you are not Canadian, please tell all your Canadian friends. Canadians have plenty to talk about – help us give them somewhere to do it.

To all those Canadians on social bookmarking websites like Digg and Reddit who were wondering, “Will I ever see a Canadian story make it to the home page?”…

…well, the answer is yes! In fact, if you rush over right now to Zoomit Canada, you find nothing but Canadian stories on the home page. That’s because Zoomit Canada is the social bookmarking website made for Canadians: “Canada’s News, Chosen By You.”

And if you’re not Canadian, here’s your chance to do all your Canadian friends a favor. let them know that they can…

I actually opened my Twitter account several moons ago, but somehow Nancy, our news release distribution expert, convinced me to try using it. So you can follow us at http://twitter.com/amabaie , where you will find a mix of business and personal news.

Twitter is a humanizing tool. It is not a place to make sales pitches. It is a place to connect with people, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes making announcements for all, always letting people know you are a real person. If you approach Twitter as networking-for-fun-and-profit, you will find it worthwhile.

Those who are new to the Web might wonder why you would want to do that. Let’s suppose your website takes 4 months to develop. If you build some links to your domain, then SEO-wise you can hit the ground running when you are ready to go live. Imagine going live and already having 100 links indexed by Google. You have a head start.

But who wants to link to a non-website? Nobody, of course, except…

Let me tell the story of a shy little girl named Melanie. Her parents moved to a new town, and let’s just say that the kids at her new school were a little less than welcoming. What’s a girl to do when nobody wants to be your friend?

Be your own friend, of course.

Eventually, anybody who is a good friend to herself will radiate confidence and self-esteem and will emit an aura of worthiness. Soon, Melanie had plenty of friends, just because she was a good friend to herself.

So, too, with link-building. If you are not yet ready to seek links from other people, set up links to yourself. Here are a few ideas how to do this:

Set up pages at Social bookmarking and social networking sites. Most of them allow links in your profile, and the more friends you have and the more items you vote on, the more link juice your profile will have. LinkedIn is great for SEO . FaceBook is good. Squidoo is ideal (Set up lots of topical pages and network, network, network). MySpace is useless from an SEO perspective.

Submit articles to general article directories and how-to/expert websites. In the resource box, you can place a link. These links are hardly ever checked by the website administrators, unless something looks fishy. Make yours an exquisitly useful, quality article and most places will accept it.

Submit comments on DoFollow blogs. Some blogs automatically add all comments. Some bloggers will read your comment and approve it if it adds value, without looking at your website. Some bloggers will follow your link and nuke your comment. (I did just that a few minutes ago, which is what inspired me to write this post.) Ah…but if the commenter had posted a lengthy comment that really added to the discussion, I might have approved it, and I think most bloggers would … although some might remove the active link to a non-functioning domain. Keep in mind that who you link to matters.

Set up blogs on other domains. You can set up blogs on Blogspot and WordPress and on hundreds of smaller websites that allow users to set up blogs. many of these overlap with the advice above to set up profiles at social networking sites.

Buy blog posts. There are plenty of paid blog review websites, such as Blogsvertise. And there are self-serve paid blogging sites like LinkVana.

In fact, you can build hundreds of links before you even have a website. All you need is to harness the power of user-generated content on other websites. However, there are a few caveats.

1. It still requires work. You might not yet have content on your own site, but you have to put quality content on the other sites, and the better the quality the more links you can build.

2. It helps if your site is live. It might take 4 months to develop, but in 24 hours you can have a nicely designed on-topic interim home page live on your domain. I suggest you do this.

3. This is not hoity toity SEO. This is guerilla SEO. There is nothing wrong. There is nothing shady. It leaves a bad taste because it should not be like this, but given that the longevity of links and the gradual accumulation of links does count to your success, it would be foolish not to take advantage of these opportunities to quickly position your new website to compete with the established players.

For the past week, I have been noticing three little icons beside certain entries in the search results. One of them is the StumleUpon logo, and when hovering my cursor over the logo it says “read 4 reviews” , or whatever number applies to that listing. The other two logos, stars and a word bubble, are attached to the same StumbleUpon reviews.

So what does this mean? Well, for starters, it is one whopper of an endoresement of StumbleUpon. Just for fun, I googled “Google buys StumbleUpon” to see if the obvious is true, and surprisingly the results show that Google actually bought a “competitor” to StumbleUpon not that long ago. Perhaps that makes this an even stronger endorsement.

In any event, what this means for you and your websites:

1. Make sure you get your website reviewed.

2. Make sure you get your website positively rated.

I am certain that before long, stumbling client pages will become a standard tactic of all SEO specialists. In fact, there might even one day be a StumbleUpon arms race, just as there has developed a link-exchange arms race these days. If you don’t have your StumbleUpon account yet, it’s time to sign up.

So if you like this blog or even just this post, please take a moment to click “I like it!” on your StumbleUpon toolbar and write a wonderfully glowing review.

This is a great article by Chris Winfield, one of the top social media marketing specialists and a frequent collaborator with The Happy Guy Marketing: You’ve Made Digg – Now What?

As with so many business decisions, people tend to rush in without a long-range plan. The script is usually the same…

Hey, let’s get the latest gadget.

Cool gadget.

Now what?

I wrote about the same problem in this article about website planning, because so many companies still are rushing out to build a website without a clue what they want that website to do for them.

Chris offers a few good suggestions on what to do about a page that has benefited from a surge in popularity as the result of a home page Digg appearance, including reoptimizing the page, adding calls to action, advertising on it, or redirecting it to another page. I would add that basically you can do pretty much anything you want with the page. For example, you could simply add the page a related survey geared to building leads for your telemarketing operations. Just keep in mind what people visiting it will be expecting. If they come expecting a video on how to carve fruits for a New Year’s Eve party, don’t fill the page with wallpaper remover products.